Saint Sebastian

(Not about language, but about art and sexuality.)

After I posted on the Flandrin pose (here), I was reminded of an even more widespread and powerful homoerotic subject in artworks, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, seen here in a 1459 painting by Andrea Mantegna:

… The saint is ordinarily depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows.

… In his novella Death in Venice, Thomas Mann hails the “Sebastian-Figure” as the supreme emblem of Apollonian beauty, that is, the artistry of differentiated forms, beauty as measured by discipline, proportion, and luminous distinctions. This allusion to Saint Sebastian’s suffering, associated with the writerly professionalism of the novella’s protagonist, Gustav Aschenbach, provides a model for the “heroism born of weakness”, which characterizes poise amidst agonizing torment and plain acceptance of one’s fate as, beyond mere patience and passivity, a stylized achievement and artistic triumph.

… In 1976, the British director Derek Jarman made a film, Sebastiane, which caused controversy in its treatment of the martyr as a homosexual icon. However, as several critics have noted, this has been a subtext of the imagery since the Renaissance.

The reference on that last point is to a 2/10/08 piece by Charles Darwent in The Independent, “Arrows of desire: How did St Sebastian become an enduring, homo-erotic icon?” But a much more extensive discussion is given by Dominique Fernandez in A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality (Prestel, 2002), who begins by asking, “Why and how did St. Sebastian become the symbol of homosexual eroticism?”, noting that Yukio Mishima in Confessions of a Mask “describes how he first discovered his homosexuality when looking at a St. Sebastian by Guido Reni” (p. 90).

Factors listed by Fernandez: “the arrows, erotic and phallic symbols”; “physical strength (the saint was a soldier)”; “youth, beauty, nakedness (one wonders why he is so often shown nude, as if arrows cannot pierce cloth), solitude (the isolation of an outcast persecuted by others), and suffering and ecstasy – a union between Eros and Thanatos. Finally, the drama unfolds far from women, in a closed, military world” (pp. 90-1).